Experience and accident mixed with frustration and optimism have combined to launch this study. I probably read about its object first in one of my schoolbooks, the 1961 revision of Everyman's Classical Atlas introduced by J. Oliver Thomson (“As a map this ribbon is absurd, but its aim is only to give roads with their stations …”), and over time I grew accustomed to the illustrations of one segment or another seen in publications of all kinds about Roman history and culture. Once I became seriously engaged with cartography from the 1980s, my awareness of the importance of the Peutinger “Table” or Map sharpened correspondingly. As the Barrington Atlas took shape during the 1990s, I witnessed at first hand the heavy dependence that many contributors laid upon this “absurd” survival for place-names and routes across the entire Roman world. At the same time, when I ventured into the emerging debate about Romans' “map consciousness” or the lack of it, colleagues' widespread preference for excluding this item from consideration on the grounds that it should be viewed as a diagram rather than a map came to seem less and less justifiable. I was for a long time incredulous that no full-scale presentation and analysis of it had appeared since World War I. Although color photographs had eventually been published in 1976, many scholars had still not abandoned their reliance upon the more accessible nineteenthcentury lithographed drawings.